Prevailing view asserts that the disproportionately greater productivities of larger cities, or superlinear urban scaling, are the result of human interactions channeled by urban networks. But this view was established by considering the spatial organization of urban infrastructure and social networks-the urban "arteries" effects-but neglecting the functional organization of urban production and consumption entities-the urban "organs" effects. Here, adopting a metabolic view and using water consumption as a proxy for metabolism, we empirically quantify the scaling of entity number, size, and metabolic rate for the functionally specific urban residential, commercial, public or institutional, and industrial sectors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResource-scale quantification of energy in water supplies is important for local-scale sustainability and for regional-, national-, and global-scale assessments of the water-energy nexus. Water supply systems within a resource region are characterized by a homogeneity in system type but a heterogeneity in system size. Size heterogeneity has traditionally imposed large challenges to energy quantification because of nonlinearities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic water supply is one of the society's most vital resources and most costly infrastructures. Traditional concepts of these networks capture their engineering identity as isolated, deterministic hydraulic units, but overlook their physics identity as related entities in a probabilistic, geographic ensemble, characterized by size organization and property scaling. Although discoveries of allometric scaling in natural supply networks (organisms and rivers) raised the prospect for similar findings in anthropogenic supplies, so far such a finding has not been reported in public water or related civic resource supplies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdsorption of uranyl at the surface of calcite was investigated by using batch sorption experiments and synchrotron X-ray standing wave (XSW) measurements. Aqueous solutions containing 236U(VI) (4.5 x 10(-7) to 1.
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